Voice telephony still being the core basis for wireless 3G and Quadruple-Play services, the range today includes voice-conferencing, -messaging and PTT services. The issue of listening quality (‘How do I perceive the other party’s voice!?’) is complemented more and more by talking quality aspects (The talker’s own voice sounding distorted with significant echo) and conversational quality limits with two or more parties interacting. New subjective and objective metrics to tackle Talking and Conversational Quality are currently under development within the ITU-T, whereas for Listening Quality metrics are already well established:

OPTICOM, as the sole vendor in 1996 originally introduced PSQM, the first objective listening quality MOS measurement recommended by the ITU as P.861. PESQ  today’s state-of-the-art MOS scoring algorithm is available since 2001 from OPTICOM and builds on an advanced PSQMlike core. Advanced PESQ OEM versions for various platforms have been devised by OPTICOM since then. The latest complement is P.862.2, a recent extension for the assessment of wide-band speech transmissions. Besides the MOS value, a number of supplementing KPIs are provided, like measurement of (variable) delay and separately calculated values for speech active and silence parts, thus giving useful indications for cause analysis on an expert level. The who-is-who of the Telecom’s industry has licensed OPTICOM’s PESQ core, so if you came across some MOS value before, there is a high chance that it was processed by our code.

OPTICOM’s advanced ECHO measurement is offered to adequately evaluate key aspects of talking quality, and it has not only become a most successful key feature of OPTICOM’s OPERA voice/audio quality tester, but - besides PESQ - it is also serving as the second most important troubleshooting KPI when OPTICOM experts are hired by operators for consultancy projects. Within the new PEXQ Software Suite OPTICOM now also introduces PESQ-TQ, a new metrics for MOS scoring of Talking Quality.

In collaboration with two partners, in 2004 OPTICOM could finalize 3SQM (P.563) as a no reference complement to P.862, thus building the 4th International Perceptual Measurement Standard in OPTICOM’s stunning business development.

And last but not least, due to OPTICOM’s strategic collaboration with Telchemy, the IP based QoS company, we will be able to support VQmon analysis in our PEXQ QoS testing solution.